Windows 8 is tanking harder than Microsoft is comfortable
discussing in public, and the latest release, Windows 8.1, which
is a substantial and free upgrade with major improvements over the
original release, is in use on less than 25 million PCs at the
moment. That’s a disaster, and Threshold needs to strike a better
balance between meeting the needs of over a billion traditional PC
users while enticing users to adopt this new Windows on new types
of personal computing devices. In short, it needs to be everything
that Windows 8 is not. […]

In some ways, the most interesting thing about Threshold is how it
recasts Windows 8 as the next Vista. It’s an acknowledgment that
what came before didn’t work, and didn’t resonate with customers.
And though Microsoft will always be able to claim that Windows 9
wouldn’t have been possible without the important foundational
work they had done first with Windows 8 — just as was the case
with Windows 7 and Windows Vista — there’s no way to sugarcoat
this. Windows 8 has set back Microsoft, and Windows, by years, and
possibly for good.